New Beginnings

I have been reading blogs for some time and recently realized I was starting to encourage others however had never done it myself. As one who often cares about consistency and fluid approach it seems almost hypocritical not to start blogging, so viola the virgin post. Fortunately I have never been shy about sharing my opinions, but enough about that since I am probably the only who cares.

In my current role at Embarcadero I spend a lot of time debating feature sets and functionality we would like to pour into our products in order to appeal to people whom work with databases. Luckily I don't have to make those decisions on my own. I have host of people with the Program Management (PGM) title telling what they think and making decisions. But bigger then that is the willingness of our customers to share opinions and ideas regarding our products. Probably the pinnacle of this is a two day marathon of ideas shared among customers whom belong to our Product Advisory Committee that concluded last week. I know this event as the PAC meetings or in some cases just the PAC.

The PAC was incredible this year, the amount of information I collected left me truly exhausted. This was the first time I got to spend time with customers who represented everything in our defined life cycle of Design, Develop, Manage all at the same time. I would like to share some of the information I received.

• MySQL is growing in popularity in larger organization looking to cut costs.
• Real time feedback is really cool
• Data replication is huge
• Any kind of feedback that improves the quality of the SQL created is really cool
• A little heads up if the table is replicated or big before making a change would be nice
• Our products are more than just tools, they are work flow which affect how people work and think
  
• Find a good way to share new feature information so that people know new feature is there

Phew, what a list. Ok there was a lot more stuff that I will share another time. Thankfully we have some new tools planned that might help us with some of these points. One of which will be introduced very soon. More on that later. The last point was of particular interest to me. As such I would like to share a new feature that isn't easy to find in our latest versions of DBArtisan and Rapid SQL. I have only ever know this feature as extraction tags. By inserting ETStart or ETEnd into the comment of a procedure creation text will result in the text being put before or after the procedure DDL allowing for some pre and post complation commands. The best example is the use of a temp table with in a procdure.

CREATE PROCEDURE foo
AS
-- CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
-- DROP TABLE #temp_table
select col1 from #temp_table
go

The above text would not execute on it's own. However if this were extracted in DBArtisan or Rapid SQL, the text would look like this:

CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
go
CREATE PROCEDURE foo
AS
-- CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
-- DROP TABLE #temp_table
select col1 from #temp_table
go
DROP TABLE #temp_table
go

which would compile, pretty cool. There are plenty of other uses for such a feature.

If you are a customer of Embarcadero and are interested in the PAC please contact your sales representative or contact me directly via email.

First blog ever finished!